Approach & Key Figures

Key Concepts and Assumptions

Therapeutic Goals

Role and Function of the Group Leader

Therapeutic Techniques

Application to Group Work in School

Links & Resources

Psychoanalytic

  • Freud
  • Jung
  • Erikson
  • The personality consists of 3 systems: id, ego, and super ego
  • Ego defense mechanisms helpindividuals cope with anxiety and prevent the ego from being overwhelmed
  • The conscious and unconscious are key to understanding behavioral problems
  • Focuses on the developmental years
Two primary goals:
  • Make the unconscious conscious
  • Strengthen the ego so that behavior is based on reality and not on instinctual cravings or irrational guilt
  • Assumption of an anonymous stance, "blank screen" approach
  • Engage in little self disclosure
  • Maintain neutrality to foster transference
Techniques are aimed at increasing awareness, fostering insight into behavior, and understanding meaning of symptoms. They include:
  • FreeAssociation
  • Interpretation
  • Dream Analysis
  • Analysis and Interpretation of Resistance therapy
  • Use psychoanalytic techniques to assist students in overcoming resistance (Zaretsky, 2009)

Reality (Choice Theory)
  • William Glassner
Human Needs and Purposeful Behavior
  • Choice theory is based on the notion that human behavior is purposeful and originates from within the individual
Existential/Phenomenological Orientation
  • to teach members the difference between the world as they percieve it and the world as other people see it
Total Behavior
  • the vasic premise is clarified in the context of understanding our total behavior
  • Includes four compeonents
    • acting, thinking,feeling,physiology
Essence of Choice
  • we are the only person whose behavior we can control is our own.
Basic goal:
  • To help members engage in new, productive behaviors that enable them to achieve present goals.
Secondary goals
  • To help clients find better ways to fulfill basic needs
  • To connect with the people they have chosen to have in their lives
• Strive to establish an empathic and trusting therapeutic alliance.
• Helps participants understand that they have some control over their feelings by choosing to act and think differently.
• Functions as a mentor by encouraging members to consider different choices.
• Assume a verbally active and directive role.
• Focus on the strengths and potentials of the members rather than on their misery.
The three techniques of reality include:
  • Humor
  • Paradox
  • Skillful questioning
(1) Humor - helps students develop awareness of situations and should be used
only after considering the timing, focus, and degree of trust of the group.
(2) Paradox - members are asked to perform the problematic behavior, thought or symptom they are trying to change
(3) Skillful questioning - involves the use of open-ended questions to help students explore issues.
  • Glasser used Reality Therapy to decrease recidivism of negative behavior for girls from 90% to 20% (Corey, 2012, p. 415).
  • Schools can empower students through reality therapy and choice theory by:
(1) creating a curriculum that aims to fulfill the basic needs of survival, belonging, power, freedom, and fun;
(2) emphasizing the rights of students to make choices for themselves and to accept the consequences that result from their choices;
(3) teaching students the art of self-evaluation;
(4) conducting class meetings that encourage students to provide input in the formulation of class rules; and
(5) creating and consistently enforcing schoolwide rules and policies that are clear, simple, reasonable, and known by all students.

Person-Centered
Theory
  • Carl Rogers
  • Non-directive counseling
  • Establish trust
  • Unconditional positive regard
  • Empathy
  • Genuiness
  • Focus on the members
  • Main functions of empathy is to foster self-exploration
  • Active listening
  • Create an accepting and healing climate in the group
  • Reflecting feelings- self disclosure
  • Activelistening
  • Paraphrasing
  • Summarization
  • Clarification
  • Respect
  • Students develop responsibility, discipline, and cooperation
  • Transforming schools where children are free to learn and build relationships

Gestalt
  • Fritz Perls
  • Emphasis on Awareness
  • Emphasis on the here and now
  • Holism
  • Unfinished business

  • Suggests experiments designed to help participants intensify their experiments and be alert to their body messages
  • Assist members in identifying and working through unfinished businessfrom the past that interferes with current functioning
  • Focuses on whatever is in the foreground of the members' awareness
Techniques are action oriented which are to intensify immediate awareness and experience of feelings.
  • Empty Chair
  • Game of Dialogue
  • Fantasy Approaches
  • Rehearsal Techniques
  • Exaggerating a Behavior
  • Dream Work


Existential
  • Martin Heidegger
  • Jean-Paul Sartre
  • Self-awareness enables freedom
  • Humans are self-determining beings that are free to make decisions and are responsible for directing their own lives
  • Anxiety assists with individual authenticity
  • Death is necessary to the discovery of the purpose of life. Meaning in life comes from the fact that life ends.
  • The search for meaning in life is strictly a human characteristic.
  • The search for authenticity refers to the ongoing process of self-discovery and continuous process of striving toward a real self.

  • Therapy is a partnership/therapeutic alliance between therapist and client.
  • Leaders bring their own subjectivity into their work (Corey, 2012).
  • Encourage members to reflect on restrictions of their freedom, how their choices might be increased, and assume responsibility for choices.
  • Foster meaningful relationships among participants by having clients focus on concerns and providing a location where the concerns can be explored (Corey, 2012).
  • Use existential techniques to assist students during times of crisis.
  • Use existential techniques to assist students in dealing with existential anxiety, death and nonbeing, and the meaning of life.
  • Use existential techniques to assist multicultural populations because it does not impose particular values and meanings (Corey, 2012).

Corey, G. (2012). Theory and Practice of Group Counseling (8th ed.). Cengage, p. 238-239.
Deurzen, E. van. (2002b). Existential therapy. In W. Dryden (Ed.), Handbook of individual therapy (4th ed., pp. 179-208). London: Sage.
Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT)
Albert Ellis
  • We disturb ourselves cognitively, emotionally, & behaviorally
  • Irrational beliefs, absolutist & dogmatic thinking
  • ABC Theory: Activating event + Belief system about the event creates C-emotional Consequence
Two Main Goals
  • Achieving unconditional self-acceptance (USA)
  • Achieving unconditional other acceptance (UOA)
  • Teach members how to stop the vicious cycle of the self-blaming & other-blaming process.
  • Assume role of psychological educator
  • Avoid relating too closely to prevent an increase in dependency tendencies
  • Employ a directive role to encourage members to commit themselves to practice what they learn in everyday situations
A wide range of cognitive, emotive, & behavioral methods are used. Clients are taught interventions to tackle problems of living in a brief & efficient way.
  • Teaching the A-B-Cs of REBT
  • Active Disputation of Irrational Beliefs
  • Teaching coping self-statements
  • Unconditional acceptance
  • Rational-emotive imagery
  • Use of humor
  • Shame attacking exercises
  • Role playing
  • Homework
  • Reinforcement & penalties
  • Skills training
  • Helps members learn to deal with situations beyond their control
  • Students are taught to think better and modify faulty thinking

Solution Focused
Steve de Shazer
Insoo Kim Berg
J. Murphy
M. White and D. Epston
Solution focused brief therapy (SFBT) is a future-focused, goal oriented therapeutic approach to brief therapy.(deShazer & Dolan 2007)
Solution focused counseling has parallels to positive psychology, which concentrates on what is right and what is working for people rather than dwelling on deficits, weaknesses, and problems.(Murphy,2008)
One of the goals of SFTG is to shift clients’ perceptions by reframing to the problem saturated stories through the counselors skillful use of language. The counselor is mainly concerned with eliciting a rich description of the client’s solution rather than listening to details about the problem.
(White & Eptson, 1990)
Primary Goal
  • Solution Building
  • To help client identify solutions
  • To help client identify what works and what does not
  • To be a consultant
Problem Free talk
It is often helpful to engage the young person in problem free talk at the beginning and throughout the helping conversation. This means talking to the young person about things in their life that are not immediately connected with the problem or challenge they are facing. Listening actively to this can tell you a lot about the young person’s potential, resources and competencies and shows them that you are interested in them as a person
By listening very carefully you will be able to identify the things that are going well or times in the past when things have gone better. Try not to concentrate your listening too much at this point on the problem. Think about strengths and successes and remember these for later use.
e.g. “Tell me about a time in the past before the problem existed? What was life like then
Goals/Preferred Future
Helping a young person to identify clear goals or a clear description of their preferred future without the problem can be very helpful. This involves questions that concentrate on what life will be like without the problem or challenge. It is important to concentrate on the details.
  • What will you notice when the problem is better?”
  • “How will things be different when the problem is better?”
  • “What will you be doing differently when things are better?”
  • “What will you be doing instead?”
Exception Question
Very few problems are present all the time. In fact, most problems are only happening occasionally. There are usually a lot of times when the problem is not happening at all or is happening to a lesser degree. Helping the young person to notice these times can help reduce the feeling of being overwhelmed by the problem or challenge and can help identify things they or others are already doing to solve the problem.
  • Tell me about times when the problem is less troubling or when it is not happening”
  • “Tell me about the times when you cope better with the problem”
  • “What is different about the times when the problem is better?”
  • “When things are tough, how do you cope?”
Scales
The use of scales is a flexible technique that can be used to help a young person identify movement in their problem or challenge. It is especially helpful when the person is struggling to identify goals or exceptions to their problem.
  • Imagine a scale from 0 to 10. 10 represents how you want things to be when the problem is solved and 0 is the opposite”.
  • “What number are you on the scale right now?”
  • “What number were you at when the problem was at its worst?”
  • “What will you notice if you moved up one or two numbers towards your goal?”
Formula First Session Task
Group Leader Feedback
Giving feedback, i.e. summarizing what the person has said and feeding it back to them, is a very useful technique. It informs the young person that you are listening to them and allows them to correct you if you have picked up the wrong end of the stick.
Questioning is the strength of the solution focused approach
Studentd finds his or her own way to a solution
based on his or her emerging definitions of goals, strategies, strengths, and resources.
SFBT is an approach that focuses on how students can change, rather than one which
focuses on diagnosing and treating problems
The setting of specific, concrete, and realistic goals is an important component of SFBT
(a) developing a cooperative therapeutic alliance with the client; (b) creating a solution versus problem focus; (c) the setting of measurable changeable goals; (d) focusing on the future through future-oriented questions and discussions; (e) scaling the ongoing attainment of the goals to get the client’s evaluation of the progress made; and (f) focusing the conversation on exceptions to the client’s problems, especially those exceptions related to what they want different, and encouraging them to do more
of what they did to make the exceptions happen.
Use in multicultural populations -
teaching child as unique individual
collaborating on goals of counseling
tailoring service to each client
obtaining ongoing feedback from each student, which is useful in prevention
http://www.handsonscotland.co.uk/topics/techniques/solution_focused%20_Techniques.htm
Corey, G. (2012). Theory & Practice of Group Counseling, (8th ed).
Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Aaron Beck
  • Cognitive behavior focuses on thoughts, feelings and behavior.
  • Use techniques to change student's maladaptive thought process.
  • Structured, active, collaborative, and psychoeducational.
Two Primary Goals
  • Focus more concretely on specific target areas of change
  • Group members list their own areas that they want to change, and that becomes their goal.
·Assume the role of teacher and encourage members to learn and practice social skills in the group that they can apply to everyday living.
·Active, directive and supportive role and emphasize a plan for change
·Draw on a wide array of techniques designed to achieve member’s goal.
·Model of appropriate behaviorsand provide reinforcement to members for their newly developing behavior and skills
·Help members prepare for termination well ahead of the group’s ending date.
  • Automatic Thoughts - A persons reaction to an external event.
  • Questioning
  • Socratic Questioning
  • Homeowrk
• Concepts can be translated in life skills to deal with various topics.
• Students can learn emotional and behavioral self-control by understanding how thoughts, feelings, and behavior are connected
• Students can be empowered to deal with present concerns and future problems

Adlerian
  • Alfred Adler
  • Stresses self-determination and consciousness
  • Holistic approach
  • Teleology – individual’s movement through life is unified and directed by the person’s self-selected life goal
  • Phenomenology –subjective manner in which people perceive their world
  • Creativity and Choice – base practice on the assumption that people are creative, active and self-determining.
  • Community feeling and social interest – central belief that our happiness and success are largely related to social connectedness.
  • Inferiority/Superiority – his theory moves clients from the feelings of inferiority to striving for superiority.
  • Role of the family – places emphases on family processes and role development.
  • Style of life – striving for goals that are meaningful to us, our behavior is influences by our core beliefs about self, others, and the world
  • provide the social context in which members can develop a sense of belonging, social connectedness, and community.
  • Inferiority feeling can be challenged and counteracted effectively in groups
  • allow members to to see the nature of their problems and that their goals can be best understood in the framework of social purposes
  • Person-person relationship
  • Modeling
  • Tending to group processes
  • Very Active
  • Structured
  • Aware of personal belief system
  • Modeling social skills
  • Visual imagery
  • Observing and interpreting members’ nonverbal behaviors
  • Constructive confrontation
  • Employing paradoxical intention by asking member to increase negative thoughts and behaviors.
  • Adlerian groups are ideally suited for development of self-esteem
  • Great assistance to children and adolescents who struggle with feeling worthwhile, likable, and competent
  • Can be designed for a variety of populations in schools